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Rudy Giuliani Is Out as Secretary of State
I hope this means Ambassador John Bolton is the last man standing. I like Giuliani but not for Secretary of State. He doesn’t have the resume for it. Foreign Service is a different kind of animal. Most get subsumed by the culture at State at the snakes in Foreign Service. Condi was consumed by them and Kerry was completely and utterly out of his depth. They ate him for lunch (and were still hungry). Guilinai was much better suited for Attorney General or Secretary of Homeland Security but he made it plain that that was not enough for him. This, of course, was his mistake. He gave Trump no wiggle room. It was SoS or nothing at all and his public statements on the matterwere sophomoric and petulant.
John Bolton is the man for the job. He has the resume, the testicular fortitude, the brash and the brains.
This CNN report is amusing. “It’s been a tough couple of weeks for die-hard Trump supporters.” Not so. It’s been a delicious couple of weeks. Actually it’s been heaven since November 8th. “President-Elect meet with opposition figures like Rahm Emanuel, Mitt Romney, and Al Gore.” So what? he is showing what an inclusive unifier he is. Obama never did that. Trump didn’t appoint any of those clowns to his administration. He’s like Don Corleone bringing the five families together. It’s all good.
Off topic, notice how CNN loves to run (yet again) Romney’s vicious insults of Trump.
Rudy Giuliani Withdraws from Consideration for Trump’s Secretary of State, CNN Reports He Was Rejected
By Kyle Becker, CNN, December 10, 106:
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for die-hard Trump supporters who have watched the President-Elect meet with opposition figures like Rahm Emanuel, Mitt Romney, and Al Gore. Sean Hannity, for one, is quite beside himself about it.
The Secretary of State position being potentially given to fierce “Never Trump” critic Mitt Romney (along with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher) seems to have particularly incensed Trump loyalists. How could the job go to a man who slammed Trump as a “phony,” a “fraud,” and “very, very not smart”?
Well, scratch another Trump ally from the list of Cabinet officials: Rudy Giuliani. The New York Post reported:
Rudy Giuliani has withdrawn his name from consideration for any position in the upcoming Trump administration, the former New York City mayor announced Friday.
Giuliani at one point was considered the favorite to be secretary of state.
The withdrawal came just hours after CNN reported he was no longer a serious contender for the post.
The most interesting part is how the announcement about Giuliani was handled. As reported by Aaron Blake, the senior reporter at The Fix:
Trump team says Giuliani has removed himself from consideration for Sec of State.
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) December 9, 2016
The ostensible reason is that the former Mayor of New York City had a change of heart and wanted to remain in the private sector.
As reported by The Post:
According to the Trump campaign, Giuliani notified the president-elect that he wanted to remain in the private sector during a meeting on Nov. 29.
Then again, why explore a Secretary of State opportunity with the Trump administration if one is interested in remaining in the private sector? As CNN reported, Giuliani was told he would not be getting the job:
Then again, why explore a Secretary of State opportunity with the Trump administration if one is interested in remaining in the private sector? As CNN reported, Giuliani was told he would not be getting the job:
Just reported on @CNN: Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson moving up the list as possible SOS. Rudy Giuliani told he will NOT be getting the job.
— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) December 9, 2016
Trump’s transition team released a statement from Giuliani:
“I joined the campaign because I love my country and because having known Donald Trump as a friend for 28 years and observing what he has been able to accomplish, I had no doubt he would be a great President…
“This is not about me; it is about what is best for the country and the new administration. Before I joined the campaign I was very involved and fulfilled by my work with my law firm and consulting firm, and I will continue that work with even more enthusiasm. From the vantage point of the private sector, I look forward to helping the President-elect in any way he deems necessary and appropriate.”
While Trump has rewarded some loyalists, such as by naming Ben Carson for Secretary of HUD, he has shunned others—New Jersey Governor Chris Christie being among the most notable.
Image Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesA plausible theory for why Trump is reaching out to opponents, like potential Secretary of State Mitt Romney, for top administration jobs was put forth by Steven Hayward of The Powerline Blog:
From Machiavelli’s Prince, Book XX:
The prince will always be to win over to himself with the greatest ease those men who in the beginning of a principality had been enemies, and who are of such quality that to maintain themselves they need somewhere to lean. They are all the more forced to serve him faithfully as they know it is more necessary for them to cancel out with deeds the sinister opinion one has taken of them. And so the prince always extracts more use from them than from those who, while serving him with too much security, neglect his affairs.
And since the matter requires it, I do not want to leave out a reminder to princes who have newly taken a state through internal support within it, that they consider well what cause moved those who supported them to support them. If it is not natural affection toward them but only because those supporters were not content with that state, he will be able to keep them his friends with trouble and great difficulty, because it is impossible for him to make them content. And while reviewing well the cause of this, with examples drawn from ancient and modern things, he will see that it is much easier to gain as friends to himself men who were content with the state beforehand, and therefore were his enemies, than those who, because they were not content with it. became friends and gave him support in seizing it.
Image Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesRush Limbaugh summarized Machiavelli’s key concept on his talk radio show:
You’ve always heard the allegation, “That’s very Machiavellian,” and it’s an insult in many cases ’cause Machiavelli was a strategist and he was practiced in the art of deceit and in human nature. I’ll read it to you explicitly, but here’s the paraphrase. The paraphrase is that it’s always better for the prince — in this case, Trump. The prince is the primary subject. The prince is the leader. The prince is the winner. The prince is the alpha dog. The prince is the person everybody bows down to. Not a royalty prince, just top dog.
And Machiavelli didn’t theorize, he stated that the prince is much better served by putting opponents, people who opposed him in positions of power because they must, in order to secure and save and operate in those positions of power with approval, they must perform by action their duties in unquestioned loyalty to the prince. Whereas if the prince goes out and finds the people who were his most vocal supporters from the get-go and puts them in positions of power, the odds are they’re never going to be happy because they’re always going to think they should have had more.
And so they’re going to be resentful, in large part, throughout the term of their service, whereas the people who opposed the prince will end up being owned by the prince because the prince is saving them. Normally opposing somebody who’s been elected president, you’re done, you’re finished. But if the prince brings some or any of those people into his orbit, those people are grateful; and I think it’s true in this case. This is public life. These are people who live and die by their reputations. They live and die by virtue of what people think of them, by their resume, and so the Machiavellian theory is that the people who opposed you the most vociferously, the most rudely, you bring them in, if they’re qualified, you bring them in and you own ’em because will have to continue to prove their loyalty day in and day out by virtue of action, not words.
So the theory is bring in Romney and he’ll become Trump Jr. He has to in order to stay there.
Regardless of the actual reason, Trump is already showing himself to be much different than his campaign theatrics might have suggested: a shrewd political operator, a pragmatist, and indeed, Machiavellian in his reasoning. And yes, sometimes that may mean bringing along a man who called you “very, very not smart.”
Image Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesAwkward.
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Source: http://pamelageller.com/2016/12/rudy-giuliani-secretary-state.html/
